I'm sitting here blogging away and I hear Rossini's The Thieving Magpie coming from the living room. Now what crosses my mind when I hear The Thieving Magpie is Alex de Large saying:
How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunich jelly thou.
I'm quite fond of A Clockwork Orange, but I'm not yet ready for my 14 year-old daughter to see it. So, I immediately jump up and run to other room and discover instead that the music is being used behind some silly Ben Stiller movie named Heavyweights on the Disney Channel. As it happens, she's not even there as the television has been left on from viewing something earlier in the day. I'm curious, any of you other parents with teenagers suffer from similar angst?
I don't really know if Stanley Kubrick intended it or not, but I cannot hear Rossini's The Thieving Magpie or William Tell Overture, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (Fourth Movement), Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance, or Singin' in the Rain without thinking of A Clockwork Orange. Memories of I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper and some of Wendy/Walter Carlos' bumper music also make the same associations, but I cannot recall ever hearing them outside of the film or my memory. Given Alex's treatment requiring the same sort of associations of music to pain, I think this is what's called irony.
You hear the William Tell overture and think of A Clockwork Orange?
Oh, you are younger than I. :•)
Posted by: old maltese at 06:50 PMAh, Charles, when I hear Rossini I can think of only one movie, Breaking Away. It may date me to state this, but that movie was a huge inspiration to me as a young man.
To this day, I love to work out with Rossini.
Posted by: Kieran Lyons at 01:03 AM